`Blue-collar warfare’

IN THE IRAQI DESERT – As pieces of the strategic puzzle came together Friday to the north, south and west of Baghdad, U.S. forces almost 200 miles away – in Nasiriyah – got a sample of the kind of firefight that may await them at the capital city.

All day, Marines battled pockets of Iraqi resistance; four Marines with the 1st Expeditionary Force were reported missing. Explosions from tank fire, artillery and rockets fired by Cobra helicopters reverberated through the city of 500,000 as Marines battled to clear the main supply route north to Baghdad.

Artillery blasts set buildings afire throughout the city on the Euphrates River – thick black smoke from a burning power plant cast a pall.

In Nasiriyah’s chaos, progress elsewhere on the Iraqi battlefield seemed so distant.

But Saddam Hussein no longer controls 35 to 40 percent of Iraq, according to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Troops were within 50 miles of Baghdad to the south; north of Najaf, the Army’s V Corps defeated paramilitary attacks, military officials said. Air attacks focused on the Republican Guard’s Medina division.

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F/A-18s from the USS Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf attacked a fuel depot and another site with missile canisters belonging to the Medina division, said Capt. Dick Corpus, chief of staff of the Kitty Hawk battle group. Royal Air Force pilots also hit Republican Guard positions 60 miles southeast of Baghdad.

“There was fantastic visibility and I could even see the camels on the ground as well as a number of bomb craters around the encampment,” Flight Lt. Scott Morley, a Harrier pilot, told a reporter for Britain’s Sunday Express. “It is not carpet-bombing, it is still precision stuff. I got two good hits on Medina division artillery pieces.”

But they won’t be ready until more forces reach the environs of a city where Saddam’s forces were expected to mass for a last stand of house-to-house fighting. And continuing attacks by Iraqi irregular forces – along with almost perpetual traffic jams on roads north – have turned last week’s sprints across the desert into a distant memory.

Marine units pushed forward. Instead of trying to avoid engagements, they looked for them, trying to clean out pockets of regime loyalists as they go. Convoys moved day and night, taking food, fuel and other supplies north, traveling in total darkness without headlights.

It’s “blue-collar warfare,” said Lt. Col. B.P. McCoy, commanding officer of the U.S. Marines 3rd Battery, 4th Regiment. “There’s no magic solution to it. It is just the hard-grinding work of patrols.”

But they did advance. Authorities said the 1st Marine Expeditionary force was north of Qalat Sikar, 50 miles up the road from Nasiriyah.

U.S. and British troop casualties from the war. U.S. totals (which include only those identified by military or confirmed by family members): 28 dead, seven captured, 16 missing. British total: 22 dead (only 10 names have been released).